Viewpoint: Why my Facebook is better than your Facebook

The digital landscape is certainty changing rapidly, and as conventional wisdom tells us, employers are increasingly taking to the Internet to dig up "background" on their prospective employees.

While Facebook can potentially replace your ink-and-paper resume, we shouldn't necessarily be looking at this as a step backwards.

Being yourself is quite important in the social networking sphere and it turns out it can also be quite beneficial in terms of prospective employment.

At least that's the idea behind a new study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology from the University of Evansville, Northern Illinois University, and Auburn University.

The study, which evaluated the profiles social networking profiles of 274 and 244 subjects across two tests, graded them in the following "Big Five" categories: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

“Rather than simply harvesting information from online applications, organizations are exploring the Web as a means of gathering information about current and future employees,” said Donald H. Kluemper, Peter A. Rosen, Kevin W. Mossholder, et.al in the recently published study, Social Networking Websites, Personality Ratings, and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye?

I can picture it now -- many of you are rushing to your Facebook profiles, attempting to delete all pictures of you partying it up in college. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Speaking to Mashable, Kluemper said, “I don’t think a picture of someone holding a beer adversely affected them, but [a picture of you] being drunk in a ditch somewhere might be a negative.”

This is an important lesson to keep in mind while managing your social media profiles, and is exactly why –- according to this study -- my Facebook is likely a great deal better than yours.

To throw out some statistics, my Facebook features 1,507 friends, 544 photos, 85 maps and 1,414 'Likes.' Don't believe me? Go have a look for yourself.

Shameless plug? Of course it's a shameless plug.

In other words, I have a lot of Facebook friends that are mostly industry connections from my time as a video game journalist, a lot of people like to take photos of me and post them on the Internet, I've visited a lot of places and I 'Like' a good amount of media, goods and services.

If I were to create a hashtag for this, it would likely be #InternetValidation.

Now let's dial this back to the study in question: The four stats that appear at the top of my Facebook timeline reflect to a prospective employer that I have a lot of friends, I'm open to new travel experience and I've travelled a great deal, that I'm very conscientious with my Facebook resume and that I'm a generally agreeable guy.

Otherwise, why would so may people take photos of me and post them?

Of course, if a prospective employer were to probe a great deal further they might discover that like the Matrix, it's all a lie, but hey, if a prospective employer wants to judge my value as an potential employee, I say go for it.

If anything, my Facebook –- despite featuring pictures of me gallivanting through the night -- is a positive reflection of the type of person I am, and with that in mind, if you are an individual of quality, then any employer worth their dollars will recognize that.

Daniel Horowitz is a Spring 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.